Even Easier LiveJournal Migration

February 18, 2009

Beau Lebens

With the huge increase in the number of people wanting to move over to WordPress.com from LiveJournal, we’ve been working hard on a better way to handle the import process. The previous importer required that you export each month and then import them individually which was rather tedious, and it also left all your old comments over at LiveJournal. Not any more!

We’re happy to present the new LiveJournal importer for WordPress.com, sporting the following features:

Enter your LiveJournal username and password and you’re ready to go

We’ll automatically connect to the LiveJournal API and download all of your posts:

Posts marked as “Friends Only” are assigned a password within WordPress (so you need to share this password with friends so they can read it. If you prefer, you can leave this password empty and then set your entire WordPress blog to “Private”. That way only the people you invite to be members of your blog will be able to read anything you write.),

Posts marked as “Private (you only)” are marked as Private within WordPress, which means that only Editors and Admins on your new blog can read them,

lj-cut tags are converted to the WordPress equivalent, the <! — more — > tag,

lj-user tags are converted to normal links back to your friend’s LiveJournal account,

Tags are imported properly,

If you closed the comments on a post in LiveJournal, then they’ll be closed in WordPress as well,

Next up, all of your comments are also imported,

Threading is preserved, so replies to other comments show up successfully (themes on WordPress.com don’t support this yet, but they will soon),

The “subject” of each comment is included as the first line of the comment itself, because WordPress doesn’t have a comment title/subject value,

LiveJournal users get links back to their LiveJournals,

Your own comments are connected to your WordPress account, and are linked back to your new WordPress blog,

Anonymous users are labeled as “Anonymous”,

“Screened” comments on LiveJournal are imported as “Unapproved” within WordPress, so you can decide what to do with them

A huge thanks goes out to Guav for letting us use his LiveJournal account to test the importer so that it can handle over 3,700 posts and nearly 200,000 comments!

If you’re using WordPress.org then you’ll get the new importer in the next major release. It’s available in trunk right now if you know how to work with Subversion, and includes some bonus features like importing your “Current Mood” and “Current Music” settings per post as Custom Fields.

Email Newsletter

Missing out on the latest WordPress.com developments? Enter your email below to receive future announcements direct to your inbox. An email confirmation will be sent before you will start receiving notifications - please check your spam folder if you don't receive this.

So does this mean that all blogs now have threaded comments? That is, if my imported livejournal can, can the blogs i’ve only written on wordpress.com have them? (And which themes allow them?) Coz that would be awesome…

This… is THE awesome. I was thinking about saving my LJ here for a long time; you just made my decision – oh, and my day, for that matter.
I have no idea how you do it, but for me, WordPress really is the best blog service ever!

As much as love wordpress, there is nothing like the community on any of the blogs that LJ has, so why would you want to migrate your journal over, the fun thing of LJ is the communities that people belong to, the blogs on wordpress are an entirely different style.

I really like WordPress so much. I used to have a livejournal blog, but because of no one hardly leaving me any comments everytime I made a blog posting, I made the switch to WordPress. A year later, my efforts paid off!

I wish I knew about this before I closed my account in another site. I left all my stuff in a huff, because I was so angry that they censored my writings and my videos and pictures due to gymnophobia. I should have thinked deep and used my mind and calmed down. Now I cannot retrieve my works. Its all locked inside their site. GRRRRR!

Great going, this is fantastic! I literally only just moved from LJ to WP and was wondering if I could be bothered to transfer four years worth of posts month by month, and now it’s done it for me! Woop!

I had a blog at Blogger and migrated to WordPress about 4 months ago, and my-oh-my, what a great change it has been!! Clearly and without doubt the best online blogging service today! Keep up the good work! Long live WordPress!!

You can only migrate from Blogger, LiveJournal, Movable Type, TypePad, and WordPress blogs to WordPress.com at the moment. If you own a domain name, then you can use domain mapping to connect the domain to your WordPress.com blog.

Great addition to WordPress for those who wish to shift from LJ to WP. Although LJ still reigns superior for me with regard to how easy it is view and manage one’s friends’ page (blogs have yet to be as user-friendly in that department, they have such a roundabout way of being able to chronologically view one’s friends’ and relevant community posts in one page), having alternatives is always a good thing!

I have both LJ and WordPress, and if WordPress integrates a better friending and community system, I can imagine making the shift someday.